Notes and ideas on mass customization, personalization, customer co-creation, and open innovation -- strategies of value co-creation between organizations and customers. This blog continues a long running newsletter, published and edited by Frank Piller, RWTH / MIT, since 1997.

July 29, 2013

A little while ago, Austrian media specialist cyLEDGE
Media has released a new market analysis about product configurators and mass
customization. The Configurator Database Report 2013 is a status quo analysis of 900 international web-based product
configurators.

The Configurator Database (www.configurator-database.com) was
opened in 2007 to give an overview about the world of product configuration.
Since then it has been constantly extended and updated and thus grew to the
largest collection of web-based customization tools. A lot of those entries
were also used for our mc500
study.

Together with his team, Dr.
Paul Blazek, CEO of cyLEDGE Media has now published the Configurator Database
Report 2013, which contains information about all 900 mentioned configurators.
Every configurator is listed with a full profile, including a screenshot and an
evaluation of different criteria. Besides basic criteria like industry, product
type or country, the report also contains data about visualization type,
tutorial, support and social media usage.

“This report is the result of a long and
ongoing journey to understand the future of customer and company relationships
in the age of customized products and interactive communication”, says Paul Blazek.

The detailed evaluation of all collected data gives very
interesting insights on the market of product configuration. A new approach is the examination of the
usage of social media in connection with configurators. The analysis
shows that more than two thirds of all companies running a configurator have a
Facebook site and over the half uses Twitter. It also shows how this number varies
according to different countries or industries. Nevertheless, when looking at
the intensity of the usage there are a lot of unexploited potentials.

The Configurator Database Report gives a very
extensive overview about the whole mass customization market. It is an excellent source to everyone who wants to start an own configurator business or wants to be informed
about the fast-moving world of configurators.